


Call It Peace

by bloodbright



Series: Dishonored works [3]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored), High Chaos Corvo Attano, High Chaos Emily Kaldwin, Mute Corvo Attano, Post-Dishonored (Video Game), Pre-Dishonored 2 (Video Game), questionably DH2 compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 02:17:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10777377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: Emily wore white to the coronation: a shirt of snowy linen under a high-collared jacket of heavy velvet the color of bone, the clasps on the front wrought of silver; pants in the finest creamy wool, soft as a whisper against the skin; and boots of sleek calfskin bleached to spotless ivory.Emily grows up an empress and learns more than one kind of weapon, and not just from Corvo.





	Call It Peace

Emily wore white to the coronation: a shirt of snowy linen under a high-collared jacket of heavy velvet the color of bone, the clasps on the front wrought of silver; pants in the finest creamy wool, soft as a whisper against the skin; and boots of sleek calfskin bleached to spotless ivory.

They hung the official portrait at the end of a hall on the first floor of Dunwall Tower, next to her mother’s. She spent a week well-pleased with it—she looked so grown up, and she thought the throne suited her very well; it was large enough that she could sit cross-legged in it, and though the back was hard the seat was nicely cushioned—and then more or less forgot about it; until one fall night when she was coming back from training with Corvo. That was four years after her accession, and though she was not yet a woman grown she was nearing a woman’s height, her head newly topping Corvo’s shoulder and the ache in her bones promising a few inches to come.

They’d hauled a sack of bottles up to the roof—rather, Corvo had nudged it toward her with one toe and raised an eyebrow at her, and she found herself scrambling upward with one hand, the other clutching at the ungainly burden across her shoulders while he climbed smoothly above her, silent and sure.

Up there in the chilly night air, they’d taken turns throwing them up and shooting them out of the air. Emily won—the second time that month, and by a more decisive margin than the last.

Corvo looked at her with a glint in his eye and she’d shaken her hair back out of her face and given him her best smirk. The satisfaction lasted all through the climb back down and their stealthy reentry to the Tower’s dark halls, until they turned the corner and she glimpsed it out of the corner of her eye: a phantom in the gloom, and she stopped dead, gone cold all over.

Corvo touched her shoulder; she knew without looking that his other hand was on his blade.

“I’m fine,” she said, too sharp, and forced her limbs back into motion; but before they turned onto the stairs she glanced back at the portrait—at the pale face under the heavy crown, and wondered whose choice it had been to dress her like her mother’s ghost.

\---- 

The truth was, the portrait was only sort of of her.

After the coronation and the banquet Emily had slipped away; she’d had quite enough of sitting still. It was easy to duck under a tablecloth, pry away the grille with a butter knife, and crawl into the duct.

It was the first thing Corvo had showed her when they returned to the Tower, his meaning as clear as if he’d said it out loud: if something happens, hide. Wait, and I will find you.

He’d taken her through the biggest ducts, but some of them were too small for him. There was exploring for her to do, and explore she did: peered down into the mad rush of the kitchen and watched a lord puke into a potted plant, another sliding spoons into his sleeves; saw all the ladies powdering their noses and dabbing perfume on their wrists.

There were too many of them. She didn’t see why they all had to be here in her tower.

She curled up and waited for them to leave. After a while Corvo came and sat with her, and she put her head on his shoulder and fell asleep.

She woke, muzzy and dry-mouthed, when Corvo nudged her. It was quiet and dark, without even lamplight to slant through the vents. She couldn’t see Corvo’s face, only the deeper darkness of his body, but she put one hand on his leg and crawled after him through one turning after another until at last he dropped out into her room and turned around to help her down.

Callista would have sighed and scolded her over the dark smudges on her clothes. But Callista was dead, and in the morning, while Emily pretended to be asleep, a servant she didn’t recognize picked them up off the floor and took them silently away.

Another identical set of clothes was procured and another girl found—the daughter of one of the footmen—to sit for the portrait. They gave her sweets every half hour for staying still. Emily considered this beneath contempt: the madame at the Golden Cat had tried to give her sweets to keep her quiet.

The painter was a thin, twitchy little man prone to licking his brushes to wet them. When he spoke, invariably in a nervous stuttering burst, his tongue was a disgusting swirl of diseased color. 

By the time she met him, the painting was complete save for the blank space left for her face. For that she sat an hour an afternoon for a week, no more. An empress had more important things to do.

Sokolov would have insisted on having Emily for the entire process, from sketches to painting; she could just remember him painting her mother’s portrait, while she made faces at them from behind Corvo’s legs.

But then, Sokolov would also have borne up better under the continuous dark weight of Corvo’s gaze. Corvo never left her side, not anymore; he slept in a room adjoining her own, and when she woke from unquiet dreams, as often as not it was to find him standing guard.

The painter—she didn’t know his name, and didn’t bother to ask—clearly found Corvo’s presence less reassuring. It was a little compensation for having to sit still to watch his eyes flicking involuntarily away from his canvas to Corvo, his brushstrokes growing increasingly jerky as each session went on. She suspected he was cutting them short; that was fine with her.

Nevertheless the portrait was at last finished and hung. The clothes disappeared; a particularly officious minor official told her they had been put in the royal archives. Emily didn’t ask if the girl had been put there too.

Time passed, and if Emily ruined her clothes it was more likely to be with sweat in the training yard or dust collected in creeping along a narrow ledge than a child’s mud pies. Corvo had learned his own lesson well: he never let an assassin close enough to stain so much as her boots with their blood.

\---- 

When Emily was thirteen and finally old enough to leave behind a child’s knee breeches for good, her tutor—Callista’s unloved replacement—went away, and she got a ladies’ maid instead: a mousy efficient sort of thing who spoke very little and left after a year to return to Redmoor and get married. She was followed by a quick succession of others, half of whose names Emily had forgotten within a week of their departures; the one that stuck, in the end, was named Lottie.

Lottie was twenty-two, golden-haired and curvaceous; she carried with her a breath of honeysuckle and roses like a dream of summer from another place, where warmth brought lush greenery and not the stink of dead things bloating in the river. She had opinions on what all the court ladies wore, and seemingly endless patience for the finer points of lapels and ruffles. More than once she whisked an item away the moment it was delivered and declared it unacceptable: the stitching was uneven, the shaping seams ill-placed, the fold of the cuffs insufficiently precise. 

“My uncle has a shop in Drapers Ward, your majesty,” she said once, after Emily had ventured on a remark on the subject. “He likes to say he dresses half of Parliament, though truth be told it’s more like half of Parliament’s mistresses.”

“I see,” Emily said. “And what are those lovely parasites wearing?”

“I could tell you that,” Lottie said. “But I have a better trick, your majesty. I can tell you what they will be wearing six months from now.”

“Really,” Emily said.

“This,” Lottie said, holding up the latest delivery from the tailor: a short jacket in dark grey, unexceptional in any way that Emily could see.

“They’re all going to be wearing that jacket,” Emily said flatly.

“No, no,” Lottie said. “But they’ll be wearing jackets with sleeves to the wrist instead of the elbow, and shirts with narrow sleeves to fit under.

“It takes time, you see,” she went on. “First the court ladies, of course—their orders will go out within the week—and then the mistresses and the wealthier townspeople and the cleverer girls at the Golden Cat—and my uncle’s shop will have a very good few months—and then the servants will get the hand-me-downs, and in ten years all the gutter rats will be wearing rags like this.”

“All because I wore this?” Emily said.

“They follow you, your majesty,” Lottie said. “You are the empress.”

As an experiment, and because the sensation of Lottie’s nimble warm fingers in her hair made her have to suppress a shiver, Emily allowed Lottie to curl it and arrange it in a loose tumble atop her head for the next party.

“You’ve created quite a sensation, you know,” Lottie said afterward, pulling pins out of Emily’s hair. And she was right: the next time there was a party, half the women and at least a few men had their hair in curls. It suited Lord Bradbury particularly ill.

This was all very well, but momentary amusement aside, Emily was not much interested in her clothes. Most days she allowed Lottie to choose them, with only the stipulation that they be comfortable to move in; it was bad enough sitting all day listening to councilors and petitioners without itching at the collar as well. But she remembered.

“Gloves,” she said abruptly one morning.

“Your majesty?” Lottie said.

“I want gloves for tomorrow,” Emily said.

“As you wish,” Lottie said, and bowed.

The next day there were a dozen pairs for her to choose from: black; three shades of near-white; grey the color of the clouds over Dunwall; and navy, wine, forest green, and others besides; plain and embroidered; in silk and velvet and the thinnest leather.

Lottie was delighted. Emily let Lottie convince her to wear the wine-colored gloves for contrast with her dark coat, instead of the black she would otherwise have chosen. It wasn’t the color that mattered.

\---- 

The High Overseer was named Yul Khulan, and he had always bowed solemnly to her and spoken to her with respect. Corvo liked him, which was to say he carried no more than his usual tension in the High Overseer’s presence. But Emily didn’t like the way Khulan sometimes looked at Corvo. His expression never changed, and yet there was something—his eyes lingering too long, perhaps.

It took a long time for her to understand the power she had had at eleven: old enough that others could not be confident she would forget her whims, given time; young enough that no one questioned her motives. If she’d known at the time, she might have made more use of it, but nonetheless she had managed to exercise it usefully at least once: for there were no Overseers at her parties and state dinners.

At her coronation ball they had been there in the crush, in their dark coats and grimacing masks, armed with sword and pistol; some with wolfhounds pacing circles around them, and others carrying strange mechanical contraptions on their chests. She had never seen anything like them before.

There were guards, too; the Watch been out in force all day to keep order, and now they lined the walls of every room. She didn’t recognize any of them, though she’d known all the guards in the palace when her mother was alive. Maybe Burrows had killed them too.

Everyone wanted to speak to her, to mash together condolences for her mother’s death and concern about her kidnapping and congratulations on her accession into a meaningless blur of words. She did her best to hold her head high and answer them as gracefully as her mother would have.

The crowd pressed in around them. With so many people looking at her, she wanted to hold Corvo’s hand. But she wasn’t a baby any more, and besides she knew he was right there behind her, close enough that if she leaned back a little her hair would brush the front of his coat.

One set of conspirators after another had kept her in a locked room, in a tower, in a ruined pub where no one came and no one would hear her cry or yell or scream.

Now she was empress. Now everyone was supposed to listen to her. She wasn’t going to be afraid of anyone.

She went right up to one of the Overseers with a machine. “What is that?” she said.

She saw his eyes go sideways behind the mask to another Overseer, who gave him an impatient jerk of the chin.

“It’s a music box, your majesty,” he said, slow like she was too stupid to understand. Madame Prudence had talked to her that way, too, before Emily had almost escaped. “It plays special music to protect you from witchcraft.” He glanced up over her shoulder at Corvo.

“Play it for me,” she demanded, loudly to make him look back at her.

He hesitated. It was the other Overseer who began to turn the crank on the side of his own box.

All around them people flinched back. What came out was a whining, pulsing drone, not at all like music. It hurt her ears and made the bones of her face buzz like it was going to shake the teeth out of her head.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Stop it!”

The music stopped.

“Take it away,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

One guard took the first Overseer by the arm; a half dozen others surrounded them.

“You heard the empress,” one of them said. “Get a move on.”

One of them resisted for a moment, his hand straying toward his sword—Corvo’s hand dropped heavily onto her shoulder and she heard the soft click of his blade unfolding—then the guard gave the Overseer a shove and he stumbled. More guards surged forward to drag the two Overseers away.

She looked up at Corvo. He was pale and trying not to show that he was breathing hard, sweating a little though he hadn’t had to fight after all, the scar under his eye standing out livid against his skin. He hadn’t liked the music any more than she had.

“Is there anything else we can do for you, your majesty?” a remaining Watch officer said.

“Make all of them go away,” Emily said. “I don’t want them here.”

He saluted, then stepped aside to speak to another officer, who nodded once sharply and sprang into action. Emily, her work done, turned to go back to her throne.

From her position atop the dais she could see little knots all through the crowd where guards were herding Overseers away. A murmur followed in their wake, shock turning to hushed approval. Emily, pleased, presided benevolently over them until it was time for the banquet.

\---- 

That particular triumph had not been without its irritating consequences. The very next day, an Overseer had come in for his audience wearing the coat of his order but no mask, only thin gold-rimmed spectacles and an carefully reasonable expression. Emily disliked him instantly.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Wilford Foster, your majesty, acting High Overseer until such time as the council sees fit to convene the Feast of Painted Kettles,” he said with a bow. “I thank you for so graciously receiving me.”

She waited for him to say something more interesting. After a pause, he began again.

“I am told your guards refused entry this morning to Overseers attempting to take up their posts here. I knew at once it could only be a mistake born of overzealousness, and hurried here at once to correct it. Your majesty, the Abbey’s sole purpose here is to preserve you from malign influence. I can assure you that the music boxes will be used only in cases of direst emergency.”

“No,” she said.

He hadn’t expected so flat a refusal. He paused, then went on.

“Do not underestimate the danger of witchcraft, your majesty,” he said. “You must understand that I speak only from the deepest concern for your safety.”

She understood very well. High Overseer Campbell had helped kill her mother. Overseers had hunted Corvo while he was trying to find her. Martin had been an Overseer, and he’d betrayed her too.

“I do not mean to frighten you. But you have much to learn. You must allow yourself to be guided by men more experienced in the ways of the world, my dear—”

He cut himself off abruptly. Behind her throne, Emily heard the rustle of Corvo shifting.

“—your majesty,” Foster corrected himself. “Men like your, ah, admirably dedicated Royal Protector. And myself, of course. There are many dangerous forces in this world,” he added, “both supernatural and mundane. The Abbey can be your ally against them—but we cannot protect you if you will not allow us in.”

“I don’t care,” she said, brave with the awareness of Corvo looming dark over her shoulder. “I don’t have to listen to you. Go away.”

He went away. A few weeks later, Yul Khulan came to pay his respects as the new High Overseer. He didn’t press the issue.

(Years later, an elderly Overseer would, under duress, tell Emily that Foster had been the frontrunner for the position until she had so casually dismissed him. The information was not, at that point, useful to her.)

Yul Khulan was less prone to cleverness than Martin, but he wasn’t entirely stupid. He didn’t need any more excuses to pry in the wrong places. People whispered; they talked. Emily, crawling through the vents, had heard them more than once; she’d had a cook and two laundrywomen let go without explanation for being too loud about it, and considered it a testament to her restraint that it hadn’t been more. The cook’s boy she caught talking to an Overseer at the kitchen door she had flogged.

Even Lottie, eternally cheerful, grew quiet when she saw Corvo. He didn’t seem to care; he didn’t seem to care about much at all. When other people spoke to him he looked right through them. It was only when when they spoke to Emily that he would fix them with his dark stare.

When he saw her gloves that morning he jolted once, hard, and then went perfectly still. She pretended not to notice, and he didn’t try to catch her eye. All the rest of the day his eyes kept straying to her left hand, his own clenching and unclenching at his side.

He would not ask her directly. She carried on. She was a little clumsy with the gloves at first—she was fortunate to be dining alone when she dripped soup down the front of her shirt—but they also hid the marks that could no longer be excused as the scrapes of an irrepressible child: fingertips hardened from climbing, palms callused from gripping a sword, knuckles reddened where Corvo had rapped them during training.

And meanwhile gloves were appearing on the hands of the court as they strove to outdo each other in ostentation. A particularly daring suitor made her a gift of a pair embroidered with an image of a Pandyssian bird with brilliant vermillion-and-blue plumage, so beautiful that Lottie sighed over them and Emily actually thought it was a shame she couldn’t wear them for fear of encouraging him. In the end, she gave them to Lottie; let him make of that what he would.

Corvo, of course, had even less interest in the changing fashions of the imperial court than Emily. He had worn what Jessamine wanted when it pleased her to dress him for court, and whatever was provided for him the rest of the time. He had worn the same midnight blue coat as long as Emily could remember: though in fact she had learned at some point that it was replaced every six months with an identical item.

“Make sure that Corvo gets his own gloves,” she ordered Lottie, some three months in: long enough to seem unconnected with her own decision.

“As you wish, your majesty,” Lottie replied; and when Emily next saw Corvo she was pleased to see that he had discarded the wrap for an unremarkable pair of dark leather gloves, armored across the knuckles.

\---- 

She’d found the shrine years ago, of course. There was nowhere in the Tower she hadn’t seen, no corner to hide from her. That night she dreamed of the man with black eyes, and of her kingdom consumed by rats: the multitude of their rippling, scurrying bodies like an unstoppable tide washing over Dunwall and gnawing it to its bones, until the Tower itself sank beneath the waves.

She woke to find Corvo bending over her, and held very still under his wrapped hand.

She didn’t like the shrine. She didn’t like the thought of Corvo on his knees before the driftwood altar, speaking to something she couldn’t see among the blue drapes that seemed to float upward into a great darkness the lamps could not touch. She didn’t like that she could feel its pull, that the air around it seemed to shiver strangely, at once difficult to look at and mesmerizing; and all the while that dizzying singing in her bones.

Still. Still. She left it undisturbed. The time might come when she would make her demands and find out if they would be answered.

\---- 

The coat she ordered for her seventeenth birthday was, though decorated along the edges with gold and richly lined, modeled on the same practical lines as Corvo’s: long and voluminous enough to hide any number of weapons, cut away in the front for ease of movement.

“Well?” Emily said after a moment.

“Oh!” Lottie said from behind her, called away from some momentary distraction. “You look lovely,” she said, smiling at Emily in the mirror.

“It’ll do,” Emily said, brusque to hide how it pleased her, and shrugged her shoulders to feel it settle into place. She sat down at her dressing table; it would take a little getting used to, remembering to flick back the long tail before sitting.

Lottie brushed her hair out and began to braid it, as she usually wore it.

“Wait,” Emily said abruptly. “Put it up instead.”

Lottie obediently undid the braid, smoothed the hair out and twisted it up and around somehow, and fixed it in place with a comb; then reached for an ornament, a spray of mother-of-pearl flowers on a golden stem-

“Leave it,” Emily said.

It was clear enough Lottie didn’t like the hairstyle; she always said immediately if she did. But Emily did. It made the lines of her face clearer, harsher, less girlish.

And when the assassin rushed her on her throne at the celebration that day, she found that she liked the faint pressure where the hair at the back of her neck pulled upward: a reminder to hold her back straight and tilt her chin down just a fraction, confronting, a little contemptuous. The guards took him alive; Corvo’s blade had passed directly through his shoulder and pinned him to the wall. They dragged him off to Coldridge Prison.

\---- 

Though it stood so near to the Tower, Emily had never been to Coldridge. That night she slipped out the window, alone, silent as a wraith; Corvo had taught her well.

A quick climb down, an short drop to the ground, then an easy walk across her own courtyard. The guards at the gate saluted her and asked no questions.

Inside, the guards’ footsteps echoed as they paced their rounds, the occasional murmur of their voices swallowed up in the cavernous quiet, the cold stink of the place. The electric lights cast harsh shadows below but did little to lift the heavy darkness above them.

They had finished with the assassin for the day.

“Nothing to report yet, your majesty,” said the guard assigned the honor of guiding her. “But never fear, we’ll get it out of him.”

The assassin in his cell was breathing wetly, curled on his side like a child with his broken hands cradled to his chest. He didn’t move when she stepped up to the bars, but there was a dark flickering gleam beneath his eyelashes: he was awake, and watching her.

The interrogation room was locked, but they opened it for her. She went in alone.

A dirty sink on the wall. The brazier still faintly warm, and a table with tools scattered carelessly across it. And the torturer’s chair and its manacles with the blood still crusted around the edges, and the stained floor beneath it.

She thought of the ragged scars around Corvo’s wrists.

Her guide was lingering outside, joined by a comrade; they snapped to attention when she opened the door.

“Bring me the assassin,” she said.

They brought him in, stumbling between two guards; forced him into the chair and closed the shackles around his wrists and ankles. Then the guards began to take up positions around him, around the room—

“Leave us,” she said.

She was the empress. They saluted and went away.

The assassin looked up at her: openly, this time. He had expected at least a night’s reprieve.

Her experience was limited, but she had always been clever and eager to learn. She turned her quick mind to the experiment: to learning the application of the hot iron and the tongs, the hammer and the chisel. The knife she was already familiar with.

He spat defiance, at first; he called her a witch and a heretic, a servant of the Outsider and an abomination. Then he went silent, panting open-mouthed with his eyes squeezed shut, and then he screamed. That was when he began to lie, but she found him out soon enough; he could not supply the details with accuracy. At last he gabbled out the truth: the hearsay that the High Overseer would not countenance without proof. The fanatic Overseers’ conspiracy; the plans hatched at masked meetings. The servants’ entrance.

She took his tongue and his hands, and left the wreck of him lolling in the chair. He would be executed in the morning. They would make a public event of it, the lords and ladies in boxes and the common folk cheering in the square; but before then, Emily had other business to take care of.

The personal maid to the empress was afforded her own room. Though it was late, Lottie lay awake in her bed, her long hair loose around her shoulders. As Emily watched, she sat up and pressed her forehead to her clasped hands, her lips moving—too quietly to hear, but Emily could guess. The Litany on the White Cliff lay on her nightstand.

Emily knew that absolute stealth was the best policy; but she was angry. She indulged herself.

She dropped out of the ceiling; came down driving her knee into Lottie’s stomach, and pinned her with it as she clamped her hand over Lottie’s mouth.

Above Emily’s black glove Lottie stared blindly into Emily’s face, a rabbit hypnotized by a snake. She didn’t struggle; but then, her soft limbs would have been no match for Emily’s strength, honed in secret.

Emily had thought, once—twice—perhaps even more than that—of getting Lottie under her, stripping away the carefully chosen clothes; finding out how easy it would be to mark the fine skin beneath. Now Emily held her down and leaned in close to the delicate ear, the warmth of that sweet summer-smelling hair.

“You shouldn’t have betrayed me,” she whispered, and pressed the sleep dart into Lottie’s neck.

Lottie convulsed once, hard, and went limp. Emily waited five more seconds with her hand over Lottie’s mouth to be certain; then she hoisted the unconscious body over her shoulders and began the short journey across the rooftop of the waterlock to the far side, high above the deep river where the hagfish swarmed in numbers.

It was done before dawn. She climbed in through her window and tossed her bloodstained gloves in the fire; sat down on the bed and waited. It was only a few minutes before Corvo followed her back in.

What did she expect in that moment? His place had never been that of a father. A bodyguard did not say no to an empress, however much she loved him. He had never once made a gesture of rebuke to her for her nocturnal excursions. That was the only reason she had never objected to his invisible presence shadowing her, and he knew it.

Once, she’d managed to fall into the river and returned dripping with slime in her hair. She’d shucked her coat and dropped it in a stinking pile, untucked her shirt to let a particularly stringy bit of unidentifiable matter slither down onto the carpet, and when she looked up again he’d appeared, clean and dry, his eyes crinkling at the corners with soundless laughter, and neatly dodged the soggy boot she threw at his head. Another time, when she’d been forced to use her pistol on a particularly persistent detachment from one of the local gangs, he’d given her a grim stare, and a sardonic eyebrow when she faced him defiantly. In the light of day, they pretended nothing had happened at all.

This night, with a multitude of unquiet ghosts between them, he only stood there a moment, his head down; and for the first time she could remember, she didn’t know what his silence meant.

\---- 

After that, Emily learned to do her own hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback welcome! If you liked the story, please consider reblogging it on [tumblr](http://bloodbright.tumblr.com/post/160207206296/call-it-peace-bloodbright-dishonored-video).


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